by Ben Okri
‘The old woman told me many things,’ he said.
‘Like what?’
‘She said we are going to suffer the future of our mistakes in advance. She said black people are the colour of fertile earth. She has heard about our family.’
We went on in silence. The spirit of the whirlwind passed us on the way and didn’t say anything. The spirit of the whirlwind had a mean look on his face and I feared for the people he was going to visit. Dad tried to find his way back to the sacred grove so we could rest there for a while before we went back home. We went round and round, following the path which led us to the cave of leaves, but we couldn’t find the marble hill and the white grove of statues. He didn’t know it, but the old woman had closed the invisible gates of the labyrinth. We were never going to find that magic grove again in the same way.
FOUR
The vanished rock
THE LAMP MADE the path clear. There were no voices in the forest air. Even the crickets were silent. We came to the place where Dad had first buried the carpenter whom he was accused of murdering. The grave was torn as if a giant snake had been thrashing about beneath the earth. Or as if a tree had been uprooted from the spot. We left the lamp at the edge of the forest. We got home safely, slept, and woke up to a new day of fanfares and Madame Koto’s disastrous return.
And so it was only much later that we realised what we should have noticed at the time, as we left the forest. The black rock which Dad had used to mark the carpenter’s grave had vanished. We should have noticed that.
And because we didn’t notice the disappearance of the rock, we were not prepared for the catastrophes that were coming.
FIVE
A silent coda
THE CATASTROPHES CAME in the guise of lovely music and bright colours in our street. There are colours that human beings still can’t see. Dad often says that we can no longer see all the colours that our ancestors saw. There is a kind of music that is so beautiful that it speaks of imminent death. We didn’t recognize the music when we heard it.
In just the same way, we didn’t hear the new silence in our lives.
When they began to cut down the trees in earnest, the forest fell silent for ever. It may be that it was this silence which really began the upheavals which would flood our lives and terminate many of our stories. The silence drove many of the spirits mad. The spirits began to drive us mad. And then we became a people that could open up colours which human eyes had never seen before, and that could conjure melodies which human ears had never heard before, but also a people that couldn’t see up ahead the seven mountains of their unique destination.
BOOK FOUR
ONE
An angel redeems our suffering in advance
MADAME KOTO RETURNED to our area with a fanfare of bells, kettledrums and praise-singers. On the day she returned an angel flew over our street to redeem our suffering in advance.
There was much music and celebrating at Madame Koto’s infamous bar. We saw her troupe of women, all in red wrappers and white blouses. There was much feasting. We heard that two goats and a pig were slaughtered as sacrificial offerings.
Mum was very lucky that day. She went out hawking and returned early with all her goods sold. Twelve times that day she bought provisions from wholesalers and sold them rapidly. She came back with presents for us. I got a new pair of trousers and leather sandals to protect my feet from the blistering road. Dad got a new jacket – a little tight under the arms, but it gave him some dignity. And later that day, inspired by the mysterious wind of good fortune, Mum replanted her precious stones of sleep in the forest. She replanted them near a shrine, in the hope that the sacred earth would regenerate their powers.
Everyone was kind that day. There was laughter everywhere. The mild sunlight and the cool wind opened our senses to the hidden joys. It was a Saturday. The children dressed in their best clothes. People were able to look their enemies in the eye without bitterness and without the horror of confrontation. Madame Koto sent her women to our various rooms with paper plates of fried goat and stewed rice. It was her way of announcing her return. It was also her way of getting the community to participate in her gratitude at being cured of her illness. We were all so well disposed towards everything that we ate her sacrificial food and suffered no negative consequences. Dad smiled a lot that day. Mum prepared the tastiest chicken dish. After we had eaten, I went out to play on the first of the many days of little miracles.
It was a time of respite from antagonisms. The sun washed the air clean of enmities and bad dreams. The constellations were in harmony. And in all the realms of existence the battles between opposing mythologies seemed in abeyance. Supporters of contending political parties mysteriously found themselves drinking together and sharing jokes. Even the blind old man was friendly that day.
The blind old man had been absent from our area for weeks. Such was the nature of his powers that we hadn’t noticed his absence till we saw him stumbling down the street in his black hat, yellow sunglasses, red cravat and white suit. He had a peculiar smile on his face, revealing that most of his lower teeth were missing. He seemed confused as he wandered home alone, feeling everything a little frantically with his sorcerer’s cane, tripping over the accumulated rubbish. Then he surprised us by walking right into our compound and tapping his way to our door. We followed him. He came back out of the compound, and went back to our door again. We were astonished to hear him say:
‘Someone has changed the world around!’
He stood at our door with a bemused expression on his face. We were too amazed to say anything. It wasn’t until he said ‘Someone has taken my house away and I can’t find it,’ that we understood.
But before we could go up to him and help, he began to laugh a little hysterically. It was as if he were confronted with greater and more tranquil powers than he had ever imagined. It was as if they had scrambled up the world and made him the butt of a divine jest. With his free hand clutching the air, he staggered from our compound. He went to the housefront and stood in one spot. He turned round and round, chuckling. Then, jabbing the air with his sorcerer’s cane, he said:
‘I don’t recognize this place!’
Propelled by the serenity of the sunlight, we rushed to him, and led him to his compound. But before we got there his followers emerged from the house and led him to his secret chambers.
Two hours later he re-emerged with a red flower in his lapel. He was guided along by a tall woman of strange beauty. Together they went everywhere, from house to house, greeting everybody, asking heartfelt questions about their children, their jobs and their health. The blind old man tipped his hat at women like a perfect gentleman, gave sweets to the children and remembered everyone’s names from the sound of their voices. He also remembered details of illnesses, deaths, and pregnancies in the family. He asked us about them, offering help. He congratulated those whose lives had improved in some way. He spoke warmly to the strangers in our midst. People laughed at his jokes.
Later he brought out his accordion, set up tables and chairs in front of his house, and played rather haunting tunes for us. He played melodies that he swore he had never heard before, melodies that seemed to dream themselves out from the accordion. The air carried the strains of his harmonious mood over the street. Concentric drinking circles formed around him.
The blind old man astounded us with his unsuspected generosity. He bought beer and ogogoro for the crowd, and ordered that everyone be fed to bursting point. Inspired by the sunlight on his face, he kicked about joyfully in his chair and played the accordion with the facial expression of a wise lizard. Squeezing out delightful tunes and variations, felicitous cadenzas and counterpoints, he positively bristled with artistic ecstasy. His accordion made us very happy that day.
He seemed possessed by the very spirit of music and played the instrument with the abandon and jerkiness of an inspired puppet. The music spread a delicious enchantment over our reality. It spread a golden hue over th
e liquid bleating of goats, over the disembodied cries of babies, and over the jagged faces of men and women. The music touched our ordinary reality in unusual ways. It touched the kites in the air made from newspapers. It touched the birds that circled the kites with what seemed like envy, but which must have been curiosity. It touched our faces and softened the angles of our suffering. And the luminous spaces within us shone out through our perspiration, catching the light in ways that made us wonder.
And so, for a heavenly moment, the blind old man’s music restored our faith in the democracy and justice of time. His music got so infectious that we started humming tunes a moment before he actually stumbled on them, as if we were in perfect harmony with the possibilities of his inspiration. This was the same blind old man whose eyes filled our nightmares with terror at the things he really saw. He was happy as a condor, playing as if he were riding the invisible humps of the wind. It didn’t even seem odd to us that he should be the one to so deepen our joy with music that could only have come from celestial realms.
We drank and sang so much that day under the auspices of an auspicious enchantment, that we didn’t get drunk on the alcohol. We only got happier. There were no quarrels and there was no violence. There was only much merriment and much laughter at the frightening faces the blind old man pulled under the influence of his musical discoveries.
TWO
‘The instinct in paradise’
THE ANGEL, FLYING over the city, filled us with fortitude enough to last through the suffering that was to come, and touched the Governor-General with a sudden perception of the beauties of the continent. Standing at the large bay window, whose frames had been repainted after the inexplicable fire, he said, to the empty room:
‘I could live here for ever.’
Outside the window he saw an African child sitting on the charred lawn. He had never noticed the child before and the sunlight made the burned grass take on a golden hue. The Governor-General, struck by a vision of African sunlight over the splendour of an English countryside covered in snow, left the window and went to his study.
‘I suppose it’s time to leave this country,’ he said, as he sat down to work on a new draft of the rewriting of our lives.
And as he wrote, his mind dissolving in words liberated from bureaucratic jargon, his eyes filled with an inexplicable yellow light which he would for ever associate with the best years of his life. He heard very faintly voices singing in golden harmonies from the servants’ quarters. He was so moved by the singing (which seemed to him so sublime he didn’t for a moment connect it with his servants) that as he pressed on with the rewriting of our existence he paused, looked up, saw a yellow moth circling his head, and wrote a sentence which completely took him by surprise. Startled by the revelation which his mood had brought out of him, he got up, and poured himself a whisky. Watching the moth, listening to the singing and to the creaking of spirits through the vast empty rooms of his great white house, he read the sentence again, and let out a long sigh.
‘WHEN YOU BEGIN TO FALL IN LOVE WITH A PLACE THAT YOU HAVE WOUNDED IN SOME DEEP WAY, MAYBE IT’S TIME TO LEAVE,’ the sentence read.
The singing grew louder; a harmonic chorus of female voices joined in; and the tinkling of bells sounded faintly beneath the voices of a heavenly choir in the remote distance of his servants’ quarters. He had never been there. He had never seen how they lived. And as he contemplated the sentence it suddenly occurred to him that though he had been in the continent for fifteen years he didn’t have the slightest idea of the true nature of the place.
The thought troubled him and I saw him get up and sit down twice, as he thought about the ritual noises of the African night that always kept his daughter awake. Then he remembered the ceremony he had attended in a village deep in the jungles of the southern creeks when he was made chief by a tribe in return for a favourable decision in a fierce boundary dispute with another tribe. He remembered the smell of chicken blood and the sweating barechested African men. His face colouring, he re-experienced the lust awakened in him by the virility of the men and the sensuality of the antimony-charmed women and the powerful smell of the ancient trees. He also recalled an occasion when his wife fainted. They had driven fifty miles at night through the primeval forests on bad roads. She had spoken of seeing ghosts along the roadside and spirits in the faces of the insects crushed on the windscreen a moment before she passed out. And then there were his daughter’s hallucinations. Her horror of being possessed by fire demons. Soon afterwards they had her sent home to school in Winchester.
He no longer heard the singing, for it had become part of his spirit and his future yearnings. He was so moved by his own feelings, which suddenly occupied such unsuspected depths within him, that, with the yellow moth still circling his head, he began writing things about our lives which he thought he was inventing from ignorance but which on reflection he felt to be truer than the things he would have written if he had known the soul of the land. He wrote his most lyrical passages about the benevolent spirit of the nocturnal continent. He suddenly became very hot. Sweat crept out all over him. He felt for a moment as if a gigantic being had occupied the space he inhabited, the space that was his body. But as he wrote he stopped being aware of the occupation, the heat, and of the sweat, which the singing intensified. He wrote his purple passages about the abounding generosity of the land, its abnormal fertility. He wrote about the innocent eyes of the old, the old eyes of the young, the incomparable sculpting which suffering and forbearance made of the African faces, and the sensuality of the air. He poured out a symphony of words about the docility of Africans and their awe of the white man, about their myth-making natures, their praise-singing souls, their touching obedience, their trusting natures, their immense and ultimately self-destroying capacity for forgiveness, forgiving even those who wounded their destiny. He rhapsodized about their love of music, their unscientific thinking, their explosive laughter, their preference for myth over reality, for story over fact, for mystification over clarification, for dance over stillness, for ecstasy over contemplation, for metaphysics over logic, for the many over the one. He praised their polygamous thinking and their polygamous gods, noted their excessive compassion, their indiscriminate kindness, their unholy abundance of feeling, their terrifying piety, their regrettable preference for the spoken over the written, their talent for languages, their abominable mathematics, their excessive interpretation of things, their penetrating directness, their deplorable habit of treating all events as signs meaning more than they do, their tremendous and saintlike capacity for suffering, their philosophical fatalism, their transcendent optimism, their irrepressible sense of humour, their childlike sense of wonder, their infuriating naivety, their oblique and magic-working art.
The Governor-General paused in his writing. The yellow moth flew towards the door. He smelt fireflies in the air. He tried to resume writing, but found that the unique mood had left him. He had taken his passage up a vertiginous crescendo of feeling entirely alien to him, and the mood had deserted him just before he reached the musical peak of his perceptions. For a moment he realized that the singing had stopped. Its absence filled him with restlessness. He got up and went to the door. When he opened it the yellow moth flew out and soared into the ripe golden sky of that unique Saturday.
The singing started again, as if under the command of an imperious conductor, and the Governor-General followed it down the stairs and outside. Without knowing why, he wandered towards the servants’ quarters. The yellow moth fluttered behind him. The Governor-General stopped. From a distance, he peered into one of his servants’ rooms. Through the crude window he saw a group of African men and women with white cloths on their heads, and six candles alight on the table. He was surprised to see them singing in the cramped room. The beauty of their singing caught him in the throat. He saw their glistening faces and poignant eyes. He beheld the gentle fever of their celebration and the intensity of their expressions. And he might have moved closer
to get a better glimpse into the lives of his servants if he hadn’t instantly become aware of being stared at, of being studied. His mood changed and a vague feeling of dread invaded the nape of his neck. He turned round suddenly and startled the yellow moth which circled the back of his head. For a moment the Governor-General felt a rush of hot blood to his brain. He felt dizzy, as if he were falling from an elevated space.
When he recovered his dignity, remembering that he was in charge of a colonized nation, he noticed the same African child he had seen earlier. The child was still sitting on the lawn, surrounded by a yellow glow. The Governor-General looked up and noticed that the African night, moving silently with its immense indigo cloak, had come upon the land. There were still a few golden showers of light in a far corner of the sky. The boy sat immobile, amongst the shadows of the charred lawn. The Governor-General moved towards him. When he was close enough he stopped and stared into the boy’s face, and was startled by the absence of awe in his eyes.
Confused by the persistence of the yellow moth, disturbed by the notion that the moods of the country were making him superstitious, and struck by the serene eyes of the African boy sitting in a yellow glow, the Governor-General stumbled back into the house, followed by the moth. A sense of magnificence quickened his heart. And with a rich sense of well-being rising up within him, he continued his writing, taking it up at the crescendo without even a moment’s doubt, and he wrote about the possibility that there were angels in disguise among the wretched of the earth, angels who were spies of God, witnesses of suffering and injustice and the arrogance of the victorious. He talked about unearthly personages in the most unlikely places on earth. In the midst of a paragraph in which he discoursed on sewage problems, poor hygiene and the people’s indifference to sanitary conditions, he found himself writing about angels in Africa, writing about the unnamed ones, who seem to be human, with eyes that penetrate the human spirit and see into the full nakedness of the heart and conscience. Then his mind dissolved into an indigo space as, unknowingly, he wrote the following problematic lines.